


Like the Hectic In My Blood (he rages)

by ERNest



Category: Hamlet - Shakespeare, Мор. Утопия | Pathologic
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Intuition of Mortality, Surreal, The Polyhedron (Pathologic), Theatre, Theatrical Conventions, Time Loop, these kids are around death all the time and it's Fucked Them Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-17
Updated: 2019-11-17
Packaged: 2021-02-08 00:14:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21466867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ERNest/pseuds/ERNest
Summary: Hamlet ought to wear a broken voice and his whole function suiting with forms to his conceit, but when he learns that he is but a fiction, a dream of passion powered by the Polyhedron, his eyes are shamefully dry.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 15





	Like the Hectic In My Blood (he rages)

Hamlet doesn’t mind so much when he finds that he has been a player all along, a thing to be toyed with. Of _course_ his life would be a performance; he’s always felt that either he was something less than real, or the world around him must be. Anyway, that revelation hardly changes his motivation, and may in fact hone his purpose. If he is to be a fiction then he’ll at least make it a good one, and no one — or nearly no one — wishes to sit around and watch a patchwork princeling fail to make a decision.

Where he _does_ lose his composure is standing at the bottom of the Polyhedron, where the overgrown grasses sway like stories. He looks down at an endlessly self-referential town made of sand and openly weeps for the dollies of cloth trapped therein. They never _asked_ for the curse of living, yet here they are in a stumblethrough for a semicolon, without even a script to guide them.

The idea that all of this applies to him as well has crossed his mind, of course, but is immaterial. Hamlet has always found it easier to work up tears for an abstraction than for his own miserable circumstances. After all, the tragedy is not that the dolls are small and lack meaning, but that they have become as big as they have and then had meaning forced on them. Even worse is that it should be a meaning so perfidious and so poorly understood by its child-authors, and that the perfidy should continue to grow.

-/-/-

Hamlet chokes on the sudden understanding: the Murder of Gonzago came _first_. Or not even the very first thing, just before _him_. First two children told each other stories, then acted them out with their dollies. The moment the dolls stopped being puppets was the moment the town of sand gained walls of wood. First a mute, then a monologue, _then_ the Murder, followed by him, Hamlet, looking for his father lost.

He has no more time to delay the inevitable, so he bids the little scribbles farewell, and heaves a sigh as he hoists himself up from the sullied and not exactly solid ground. He has a foil to fight and a plot to foil, assuming he can manage either one. The alleys and avenues draw him on until he is standing at the top of a fencing lane, while a riotous head stares him down. He still has time to save this town from the Plague which plagues it. They’ll have a chance, at least.

-/-/-

Or he can die. From inside a box he hears the cries of children following the funeral party to his final resting place. Between the type of jokes and the voices telling them, Hamlet recognizes the same gravediggers who gathered around a hole he didn’t know yet was meant for Ophelia. And then he remembers. Oh, why didn’t he think it strange before? To have _children_ doing that sort of work, to let them always breathe in the smell of rot, is peculiar, if not outright monstrous. And yet, he never even noticed those waif-like undertakers enough to forget them. They never even _occurred_ to him until right now.

And now he’s dead, all perspectives shattering apart at once. The children tell their dolls all they’ve seen and the child dolls grow up in the wasp’s nest of a mausoleum watching their parents act out generations of invention. Somehow Hamlet knows all this, just as he knows that when all the players are dead, all the dolls turned children will gather up all the players turned toys, and depending on their mood the rag men will be tossed into a hole or piled onto a pyre.

And somewhere in the past or in the future, someone will build a city out of sand.


End file.
